


Rosemary for Remembrance

by ssrhpurgatory



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Reflections on Mortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-15 20:02:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29689230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory
Summary: Alexander Hilbert visits an empty grave and remembers the woman who isn’t buried there.
Kudos: 3





	Rosemary for Remembrance

He brought her rosemary on her birthdays.

It was close enough to the day she had died to mark that occasion too, but he avoided it if he could. Better to come to her grave a day late with a never-to-be-heard apology on his lips than to give any semblance to remembrance to _that_ day.

He did not know if she actually liked rosemary. It just seemed appropriate. He had brought roses the first time—red ones—and when he placed them on her gravestone he found himself imagining how she would react to such a gesture. 

Call him a damn fool of a man for trying to court a dead woman, most likely.

The roses had not fit, anyway. She had always been larger than life, but her gravestone—grave marker, really, just a marble block big enough for her name and the relevant dates—was anything but.

Not that it marked a grave with anything in it. Still, he wished he had been able to afford better for her. Wished it had not fallen to him, to make this paltry attempt at a monument to the life of a woman that everyone seemed eager to forget.

No one else had been willing to do it, though, so he had. Foolish sentimentality, perhaps, but he always had been a fool where she was concerned.

The rosemary was better than the roses had been. It did not overwhelm that marble block when he laid the bouquet of fragrant greens down upon it. The roses had drowned that stone in their abundance, and he had snatched them away a moment after laying then down, feeling as if they were trying to blot out the last sign that she had once existed, that she had been real.

Sometimes he laid himself down in the grass beside that headstone and wondered whether he would have an empty grave in this graveyard some day. Wondered whether he already did, whether the aliases he had discarded along his way had been buried in the dirt where a body should have been, empty graves for empty lives that had never really been his.

He did not go looking. But he wondered. Wondered if everyone would strive to pretend he had never existed as swiftly as they had her, wondered if anyone would care enough to see that he got even so much as that empty grave.

Perhaps no one would.

But it was not as if he would be around to protest the matter, anyway.


End file.
